Tag: Sápmi

Kiruna/Giron, July 1st, 9 pm. The sun won’t set tonight, nor for another couple of weeks.

The recorded voice of Hans Forssell, a state attorney, booms from the speakers of the festival stage Cityscenen. A group of people are shouting “Jannok, Jannok!”, drowning out the contemptuous, racist crap from a 2016 court case between the Girjas reindeer herding community and the Swedish state.

Sofia Jannok enters the stage to the sound of the cheering audience. Kiruna has been a mining town for 127 years, and the state-owned company LKAB—Luossavaara Kirunavaara Aktiebolag—has long been and is still a key contributor to Swedish state wealth. Jannok’s stage at Kirunafestivalen has a view of both the Kirunavaara/Gironvárri mine and the surrounding mountains and woods where Sámi people lived for about ten thousand years before the crown and state of Sweden took an interest in these lands, and where Tornedalian farming settlements coexisted with Sámi culture for several hundred years before Swedish colonial settlements were established in the 17th century.

The Kirunavaara mine. Photo by Håkan Sandström

Jannok’s drummer hits the snare drum in the march-like intro to the song “This is my land – Sápmi”. Jannok points to the mine and sings: “If you want to ruin it all with big wounds in the mountain, then you’re not worthy listening to this song”. This line leads into a power yoik—yoik being the traditional Sámi vocal style which Jannok mixes with pop music, creating an evocative and original sound—which seems to me to embody both the anger and the joy someone feels when they fight to protect what they love. Her voice and her eyes express grief and loss, and then happiness and love; despair and anger, and then a fierce, euphoric fighting spirit—moving seamlessly between these inseparable feelings. In “I ryggen på min kolt” (“Backstabbing my gákti”), Jannok again points to the mine, singing: “Att sälja landet åt gruvor kallas folkmord”, “To sell the land to mines is called genocide”.

Before the song “Čuđit – Colonizer”, Jannok talks about the last time she arrived at Kiruna airport where she remembers a sign that read “Välkommen till Europas sista vildmark”, “Welcome to the last wilderness of Europe”. She observes that wilderness means unpopulated; the sign at the airport suggests that Sápmi and Tornedalen were empty before they became part of the Swedish state. Jannok says, “there is no wilderness”: “Who do you think named these mountains, in several languages?”. People were living with the land and gave places names in Sámi and Meänkieli (Tornedalian) before others came to colonise the land.

“Čuđit – Colonizer”

Never empty, she was never wild

Stolen cruelly away from her child

Taken care for thousands of years

In seconds she’s ruined seas to seas

Kiruna, or Giron in northern Sámi, means ‘snow grouse.’ Not incidentally, Jannok sings a song called “Snow grouse – Ii leat ivdni mus” which is about surviving:

Invisible though I’ve always been here

Like a snow grouse I fly though they want me to die

The crowd at the festival. Photo by Håkan Sandström

To my left, three young people in colourful, patterned gákti—the Sámi regalia—are dancing with a Sámi flag.

Behind them, there are a few older women in blue gákti.

To my right, a middle-aged man is standing alone, dressed in a smart checked shirt, jeans, and a black cap decorated with reindeer and a small Sámi flag. He removes his glasses, to wipe away what seems to be tears.

When I turn around to view the huge crowd, two women behind me who are dressed in contemporary European fashion speak—to me, I think—in a northern Swedish accent, saying “Hon är så jävla bra”, “She’s freaking awesome”.

Closest to the stage by the fence is a line of young girls, many with Sámi handicraft—Duodji—handbags.

A few people in their twenties and thirties, seemingly a bit drunk, are dancing in front of me without paying much heed to the people around them, and two of them know the kids by the fence and sometimes hug and dance with them. Some of the kids don’t seem entirely happy about this.

To the left of the drunken dancers, three people form a kind of line by hugging each other, watching and listening intently to Jannok.

A bit behind me on my right there is a group of people whom I read as queer. One of them is wearing a “don’t assume my gender” t-shirt.

Between two of her songs, Jannok talks about “the strong souls who held on so that I can stand here now”.

Sofia Jannok. Photo by Håkan Sandström

Before one of the last songs of the gig, Jannok says, “Whatever happened yesterday, you are still here”. She presents the song through a powerful image: When horrible things happen, you take the hate this awakens and you close your fist around it like around a small stone, and you hold it there until it has become love and then you open your hand and let the love come out. You spread love. That’s how you survive; that’s why diversity and goodness still exist in a colonial world; that’s how we are still here. Then Jannok sings “We are still here – Mii leat dás ain”—which is also the name of the tour.

After “We are still here”, a big group of people near the stage shout what I would venture to guess is “one more time” in Sámi. Someone comments in Swedish that half of Sápmi is there at the gig.

I feel a bit introverted, hiding in my hoodie, wanting to be in a quiet place to think and feel everything Sofia Jannok’s concert has made me think and feel.

I don’t know if the people around me are representative of Sápmi, or of Tornedalen—the Torne river valley—or of Kiruna/Giron. Regardless, these people remind me that there are all kinds of people everywhere: in Gothenburg in the south where I currently live, in Sápmi and Tornedalen, in Kiruna; in an urban core, in Indigenous and other local communities, in a mining town.

I think about something Jannok said during the concert: “I wish that no one would ever have to argue with the state or with anyone else, saying ‘yes, I do exist’”. All of us exist and we are all different. She called the audience her rainbow and sang “Jag är regnbågen på din näthinna”—“I am the rainbow you see”, or “I am your retina’s rainbow”. This is a theme Jannok returns to over and over again, like in “I ryggen på min kolt” which concludes with the words “Colours exist because everyone’s here”.

Leaving the festival, walking back to my father-in-law’s flat in the midnight light, I wonder if anyone wearing a gákti will be harassed or beaten tonight, remembering the line from Jannok’s song “Čuđit – Colonizer”: “Go gávtti biggo šaddá návddiin diggot”, “Wearing your gákti means dealing with beasts”. I wonder if anyone will be sexually harassed or raped tonight—sexual harassment and rape have haunted Swedish festivals this summer, as they have always done. I wonder how many lonely people will get wasted and break down tonight, here in the area called the Vodka belt where talking about your feelings isn’t always a priority. I wonder how many angry, underprivileged men will bond over racist comments about the Sámi and refugees tonight.

I wonder why some people, in particular here in the north, channel their despair, grief, loss, loneliness, and anger in the form of hatred towards the Sámi. That very few Sámi people have minor, relative privileges compared to some other underprivileged groups in the north seems like a simplistic explanation. I wonder if this hatred isn’t also about a kind of jealousy: maybe people envy the Sámi for the Sámi sense of community. I know that, when Jannok sings about her love for the land and her people, I find myself longing for being in a community of people and land.

If a sense of community is what you want, no hatred is going to fill that empty space. Instead of spreading hate, it makes so much more sense to hold it in your fist until it becomes love and then spread that love. It makes so much more sense to build a local community with the people around you; to create your own story about injustice, extractivism, and colonialism; to define what you would demand from the state and other sites of power, and then join the Sámi in their struggle for local autonomy and land rights.

Just outside my father-in-law’s house, from the parking lot, I can see the closed Luossavaara/Luossavárri mine in the distance. The name means Trout mountain. I wonder who gave it that name once. It looks lonely.

Rut Elliot Blomqvist is a songwriter, musician, writer, and PhD student in literature and environmental humanities who thinks a lot about environmental justice, degrowth, and the mythologies of contemporary Western society. Ze particularly likes to combine storytelling, music and analysis with activism and farming in searching for ways to describe and build a good life for hirself and others.

The European core nations have colonised the world. This system is not only based on the unequal exchange of land and labour—as the anthropologist Alf Hornborg has shown inGlobal Ecology and Unequal Exchange—it is also on the verge of making the planet uninhabitable. So the world must be decolonised. But what would it mean to decolonise Europe? How do we decolonise the core of the world system—the area of the world that gave birth to colonialism itself?

Another world exists

In the north of Scandinavia, there is an Indigenous culture that has persisted against colonisation. The land is called Sápmi. The Sámi, like all Arctic Indigenous peoples, are experiencing the severe effects of rapid global warming and decolonisation is now more than ever a matter of survival.

Sofia Jannok is a songwriter, yoiker (yoik is a traditional Sámi vocal style), and pop singer; activist, environmentalist thinker, and reindeer owner. Through her words, melodies, activism, and existence, Jannok pushes for decolonisation. The title of the last song on her latest album ORDA: This Is My Land is “Noaidi,” a Northern Sámi word that means shaman but that she also translates as “Decolonizer.” The noaidi drives out the colonisers and their mentality. The noaidi reveals another world, a story that has been silenced in the history of the Swedish nation state.

For me, the encounter with Sofia Jannok’s music and stories opened the door to a new world-view. I am an urban middle-class Swede brought up to think that industrialisation is necessary and that this mode of production combined with better welfare distribution means progress for all. I have always had a nudging feeling of something being wrong with the story I have been told but other narratives are rarely given space in the media, nor in the academic contexts or political organisations I have been part of.

I was able to interview Jannok to explore the connection between her music, the decolonisation of Sápmi and of Europe, and the necessity of Indigenous rights and Indigenous peoples’ perspectives for all of humanity. This article tells the story of the other world that already exists in Jannok´s Sápmi. I weave a pattern of our conversation, her songs, images of what her stories make me feel, and examples of colonisation past and present.

Jannok and I begin by talking about music. I ask her about the role of music in Sámi decolonisation work and she emphasises that the increased focus on Sámi musicians and artists in the Swedish media often misses the historical ties between artistic expression and political struggle in Sápmi:

The national media in Sweden are only now opening their eyes to what is happening in Sápmi, because music is bringing these things to the fore. But music has always been an essential part of the decolonisation work that Sápmi has undertaken for as long as I have lived and long before my time.

She tells me that she sees her voice as a continuation of the voices of the past. Some of her influences, or precursors, are the yoikers, musicians, and activists Áillohaš (Nils Aslak Valkeapää) and Mari Boine. She also mentions all the music that came out of the action in Alta in Norwegian Finnmark in 1981—a manifestation, Jannok says, that made Norway take Sámi politics seriously, leading them to open a Sámi parliament and sign ILO 169 (the UN convention on Indigenous peoples’ rights, which Sweden still has not signed).

I continue what previous generations started: mirroring the contemporary world—as art always does, or at least I think it should.

Indigenous art can be an important mirror: it reveals parts of reality that are obscured or distorted by the colonial mirrors that dominate many people’s view of the world:

It’s through art and culture that we can look back on what another time was like. From my perspective, neither history books nor the media are impartial. With regard to us in Sápmi, an efficient way of obscuring and oppressing is to say that we don’t exist at all. And because of that I think that art and culture and music gives a more fair and true image of reality, because it is told through the eyes of the ones who experience it. All over the world, the history of Indigenous peoples has mainly been told by the colonisers and of course that yields a pretty slanted image and a very short-term perspective too because the time that colonisation has been going on is only a second if we compare it to how long we have existed on the earth.

Through a decolonised picture of reality—this is how we can see the other world that is possible.

Colonial blindness and Indigenous grief

On her latest album ORDA: This is my land, Jannok has a song that contrasts these two reflections of reality—the colonial and the Indigenous one.

“Grieving: Oappáide”

Not grieving the loss of you home sweet home

Not grieving your walls that for all times are gone

Not grieving, because they were already gone

Your house was built on an old woman’s home

I’m grieving the wide open wound that I see

When will they understand when to let be?

I’m grieving for her because she lost it all

Under your kitchen floor buried is her soul

The first time I heard this song, all illusions about the goodness and soundness of my society started to melt away. I felt that it spoke to me; that I was the “you” that this song is directed to:

I—the grieving Sámi.

She—our mother, the earth.

The kitchen—the food, energy, of the colonising world, which has buried our mother’s soul.

You—the blind people in the colonial state, who do not see what they have lost.

They—the core of the Swedish state, which colonised Sámi land and whose colonial project is ongoing.

Like the Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island (North America) who are right now protecting their home and the earth from the Dakota Access Pipeline and the expansion of the Tar Sands, Jannok and the Sámi see that the colonising industry wants to “steal our mother”—a line from Jannok’s song “We are still here”—and so they are protecting the land, water, air that we all depend on. Jannok was in fact part of a Sámi group that went to Standing Rock in North Dakota to show their support for the activists there.

But the core of colonial society in Sweden contests the parallels between the Sámi and other Indigenous cultures. On ORDA: This Is My Land, Jannok shows this very clearly by including excerpts from a hearing in a court case between the Sámi reindeer herding community Girjas and the Swedish state—a case that Girjas won, though the state has appealed and a new trial will be held in 2017.

In the hearing the State calls a witness, a non-Sámi resident of Finnish Sápmi, who voices the opinion that the Sámi are not an Indigenous people and that the colonial theories that have been developed “for North America and Australia” do not apply to “Lapland” (or Swedish Sápmi). Jannok explains why she contests this claim on her album:

I draw parallels to other Indigenous peoples precisely to debunk the opinion that Sámi people aren’t Indigenous. As if that was an opinion when it’s fact, and facts are facts and can’t be overlooked: the Sámi are an Indigenous people. The opposite is to claim that the earth is flat and try to discuss from the starting-point of the earth being flat when we have already agreed that the earth is round. Let’s start the discussion from there. We are an Indigenous people. Grant us our rights, that we have maintained for ourselves for thousands of years.

This fact does not stop the Swedish state from telling its own story about the Sámi. In one of Jannok’s samplings from the hearing, the state attorney questions the concept of ethnicity and its relevance to the description of the situation in Sápmi. Listening to this, I remember the music video to Jannok’s song “Viellja jearrá” (“Brother asks”) where the history of racial biological studies on the Sámi is shown. In the light of the history of Swedish eugenics, we can begin to understand the degree of disrespect shown by the state when it now refuses the Sámi the right to define themselves as an Indigenous community. The state in the past studied the Sámi as a “lower race” and now instead wants to do away with the concept of ethnicity. It is hard to find a better example of how Sámi politics are reframed to suit the political agenda.

The state attorney also says that “the State has done its utmost to regulate the reindeer husbandry trade in a generous way” and that “the Sámi have not been subjected to discrimination by the State”. These types of statements can feed widespread prejudices in Sweden about the Sámi as privileged—prejudices claiming that the Sámi both receive special privileges to keep reindeer and benefit from modern infrastructure and technology. What these claims entirely leave out is that the Sámi did not choose to be incorporated into this modern industrial society. The state never asked the Sámi if they would like to abandon a subsistence lifestyle for a professional, regulated reindeer trade.

Part of the decolonisation work is to confront this racist discourse about Sámi privilege. An example of this in Jannok’s music is one of her most fiercely political songs, “I Ryggen på min Kolt” (“In the back of my gákti”—gáktibeing the Sámi word for a traditional regalia) which is directed at the Swedish state and its double standards; when it wants to use Sámi culture for advertising in the tourism industry but not grant Sámi people their rights. She sings:

Du söndrar mellan grannar som lärt sig leva bredvid varandra

Sprider lögner om min familj, mitt folk

Dina ord en dolk

Rakt i ryggen på min kolt

You’re sundering neighbours who’ve learnt to live next to each other

Spreading lies about my family, my people

Your words, a knife

Right in the back of my gákti

The song reveals how, in a classic case of “divide and conquer,” the idea of Sámi privilege is used by elites to play out oppressed groups against each other. There are numerous examples of what this sundering of neighbours has led to today—ranging from racist comments on the internet, verbal harassment, and vandalisation of Sámi language road signs, to hate crimes such as assault and battery, killed reindeer, and arson of lávvu (the Sámi equivalent of the North American tipi).

But “I ryggen på min kolt” tells us that this racism was not always there, that we are all being told lies about the Sámi and the history of Sweden and that this is creating enmity. Decolonisation requires retelling history.

Decolonising history

The slanted colonial story of the past and present has been and is motivated to a large extent by the mining industry which has fed the modern Swedish economy, although colonisation through farming settlements goes back several hundred years before this as well. The “golden age” of social democracy and the welfare state was funded by the unequal exchange of land and labour between the core and periphery in the Swedish territory. Jannok, in her work, unearths this inconvenient truth:

“Snölejoninna: Snow lioness”

Antirasist my ass,

när du inte ser från vem du snott all din cash

Han, hon, hen “son”

av oss stal du landet en gång

Urfolkskvinna, snölejoninna, jag är regnbågen på din näthinna

jag är allt det men jag är mer, “mon lean queer”,

har funnits här i tusentals years

An outspoken anti-racist, my ass

You don’t even recognize the people from whom you’ve stolen all your cash

“Son”, he, she and ze;

Once you stole this land from me

A native empress, the rainbow you see, a snow lioness; well, all that is me

All of it, yes it can all be found here, yet I am something more, as I am queer

Residing here for thousands of years

(“Son” is the Northern Sámi third person singular pronoun, which is always gender neutral.)

This song shows the reality of the resource flows in the colonial-industrial economy, but its focus is on the Sámi as dynamic, as queer—without even a grammatical gender divide—and diverse. It is about telling her own story about who she is and can be, or could be. Jannok says:

“Snowlioness” is partly about how the box that society wants to squeeze me into doesn’t have to be a box. Instead I can be all of this and still have the right to be Sámi.

“Diverse” is a good word to describe both Jannok’s Sápmi and the history of northern Scandinavia. The nomadic Sámi population and the settlers of the north coexisted in the past and both groups benefited from their cooperation. Some non-Sámi people had reindeer and many farmers housed Sámi families on the move between summer and winter pastures.

This decolonised story of the past is slowly gaining space in mainstream media because of the music and activism of people like Jannok, and finally also in some history books. One of these books is Urfödan: Om självhushållets mat hos folk i Lappland (Ancient food: On the food of self-sufficiency among people in Lapland) in which Lillian Ryd interviews people from the last generations of both settlers and nomads who lived traditional, self-sufficient lives in northern Sweden before industrialisation all but erased these livelihoods. Through such stories about the past, we can begin to see that the people who benefited from the exploitation of land and labour in the north of Sweden were responsible both for the colonisation of Sápmi and for taking the land away from farmers through the 19th century enclosure movement (“Laga Skifte”).

What has happened to people’s livelihoods in this process is that they have been incorporated into the industrial structure of big society. This is true for both the Sámi and the settlers. One example of this that Jannok mentions in our conversation is the state’s regulation of reindeer herding:

The term “renskötsel” (reindeer husbandry) alone is a very clear example of how society has wanted to label a lifestyle to enter it into its laws and regulations, and then deciding who can do reindeer herding and not. To have zero experience, not even having seen a reindeer or visited a reindeer herder’s everyday life, and still regulate and make decisions that don’t match reality. So you only see the tip of the iceberg if you see a privilege.

The traditional lifestyle of the Sámi has in modern history been undermined by the establishment of national borders, mines, the forest industry, hydroelectric dams, military test ranges, and wind parks. It has also been attacked culturally through eugenics, boarding schools,forced sterilisation, and forced Christianisation—which among other things entailed a ban on yoik. Then, after these atrocities, the state came up with the term renskötsel—a word that, Jannok says, doesn’t even exist in Sápmi traditionally—in order to incorporate this lifestyle into an industrial-professional economy. Reindeer-owning Sámi people became professionals in the reindeer food business. Sámi people who did not own reindeer lost their legal right to be Sámi, Jannok adds:

This led to internal conflicts and differences between Sámi people and Sámi people, which has severe consequences even to this day.

If we look beneath the surface, what we see instead of privilege is the attempt by a colonial state to eradicate an Indigenous population:

For the Sámi, the equation doesn’t add up, and it will be the death of us unless someone listens soon. That’s the way it is. This is an Indigenous culture and it depends on the right to land and water and the reindeer and our settlements. Every day that you infringe on these rights it becomes a little harder for us to survive. We have nowhere to go anymore. That’s just how it is. And it doesn’t add up. It doesn’t add up.

Hearing these repeated words, I feel the grief that Jannok sings and yoiks in “Grieving”. I feel called on to share a decolonised story of our past with all those who still take out their sense of loss and their anger on the Sámi. Stockholm, Oslo, Helsinki, or the world market should be the target of everyone’s anger, and we should work together to build other ways of living with the land—our mother.

Another world through consensus-based decision-making and Indigenous knowledge

There are alternative ways of living—we do not have to sabotage the home we live on in order to live good lives. In fact, if we exploit and pollute the earth, then none of us—like the Sámi now—will have anywhere to go. Colonial society is blind to this. Jannok explains that it is much clearer to her than to many others since she has had the benefit of growing up in a family that is entirely dependent on what nature gives.

The relationship to the earth, Jannok says, gives Indigenous peoples an insight that is lost in the industrial core countries of the West. So, as one decolonisation strategy, could we perhaps imagine a Sámi council in Sweden that advises on environmental issues and pushes back colonial-industrial values from decision-making?

Absolutely. We even have an example of this in the management of the Laponia world heritage area which is located in a very large part of Swedish Sápmi. Sápmi has fought seven hard years to get a majority on the board. Now every decision has to be reached through consensus, which is a typical way to reach decisions in reindeer herding communities.

Majority rule doesn’t work if you are Sámi you know, we’ll lose every vote. We are so few. There are alternative ways of solving it. I really believe in a council where Sápmi actually has the right to say something. Because as it is today there is supposedly consultation and dialogue around every infringement on Sámi land—with LKAB for instance, a large mining company, if they want to prospect for minerals, then the Sámi community is supposed to have a say—but that’s not how it is in reality.

You can voice your opinion but no one takes it into consideration. And that’s not dialogue. That’s information. So I think an influential Sámi council is a great idea. I don’t understand why it isn’t already like that, with Sápmi having an obvious role in saying how things affect life, nature, the water, the air, the earth. We are dependent on it and for us it is extremely clear but it’s actually for the benefit of everyone. We can’t drink poisonous water, that’s just how it is.

Jannok goes on to describe what has been lost to a great part of the world’s population, and to show that Indigenous rights are important not only for Indigenous peoples but for humanity and the earth itself:

A big part of the world’s population has lost the connection not only to the earth but also with the elders and the knowledge that generations before us had built up. People have been cut off from this, because of industrialism, individualism, egoism, greed. But it is still here, we are still here. Indigenous peoples exist all over the world and we have still got that connection, not least with the elders, the old generation. And with animals and the places we live in. We see how they change. I mean, it is not a coincidence that all the research reports that indicate evidence of climate change and that the gulf stream is changing, these are things that Indigenous peoples have already confirmed decades before. So there is already a lot of evidence that it can be for the good of all to actually listen to these people. This competence that you can find among Indigenous peoples should be used, and it doesn’t have to be proven in accordance with Western methods to be valid. We see, we listen, we feel, we can remind others about how you do this, because we all come from the earth so of course everyone has this ability. To listen.

To get more people to listen and reconnect with their own ability to see, hear, understand the earth and other living beings, Jannok has moved from singing primarily in Northern Sámi to singing mainly in English, and some Swedish as well. And the soundscape, production, and rap-inspired vocal style on her latest album also contribute to a sense of her music being more confrontational:

It is a more direct rhetoric. I have moved away from writing more poetically—I’ve always been critical in my songs but allowed art to be art, giving the listener a chance to interpret it in their own way. Now, on my latest album, I don’t want to do this, I want to be as direct as possible. I want to say things that for me have been like saying that the sun rises or something: It’s that it’s light all summer; it is that we are still here. For me it is self-evident, but it apparently isn’t to the ones who always go, ”hey, but, what do you mean with Sámi, do you even exist?” I also want to say “This is my land,” because the focus is always on something other than the fact that this is Indigenous land. Though it is described on every single map—there isn’t one map of Sweden that doesn’t have almost all names in Sámi in northern Sweden. So these self-evident things are what I want to write and I don’t want to leave any space for misinterpretation. It should be clear as daylight what I mean.

Jannok and others like her, from Sápmi and other parts of the world, are giving a voice to alternatives. These stories have the power to change people’s minds and dreams—and so they can also change the society we all build together.

Hope. But there will still always be doubt. Anxiety. We can never know if it will be enough. To find the will to live can be a struggle. All we can do is listen, understand, act, and pass the torch, the fire, on to the people who come after us:

“Grieving: Oappáide”

What else can I do but to sing all these songs,

to sing and to hope that we’ll always belong?

I sing to the healing of ancestors’ soil

For future sisters I’m singing this song

What else can I do but to sing all these songs?

For future sisters, I hope they keep strong

To support these future sisters (oappáide means “to the sisters”), to help Sápmi stay strong, Jannok has donated money to the Sámi youth choir Vaajmoe—a choir that developed from the need for a meeting-space after the suicides of several young Sámi. And, of course, Jannok’s own music is part of that same movement of singing yourself into existence, making a place in the world for yourself and the people who walk with you. Jannok’s song “Áhpi: Wide as Oceans” is also about suicide; a tribute to those who have left and a comfort to the ones left behind.

Áhpi sheds light on a reality that exists and that has a taboo on it: mental health issues. To simply shed light on things that are real but invisible is to acknowledge people who live that life. To be seen.

Light, life, love—a land for everyone

Light. She constantly returns to this—to the bright summers with the midnight sun and to the fire that lights your way in the winter:

It’s not in the fight for my own existence that my fire has its source. It’s in life. And life is so beautiful, rich, full of laughter, hustle and bustle between bare mountains, forest lakes and cities. With strong ties to my people, both the ones who have passed and the ones who are and the ones who shall come. My inspiration for everything comes first and foremost from all the colours of life. From the riches of Sápmi; pride, power, and the indubitable fire of existence; from love for people and my beloved hoods. Everyone who claims that we’re a minority, on the verge of extinction, a disappearing part of world history, haven’t been to my world. Anyone who has seen it could never claim such a thing. We are fully alive as long as the earth breathes, because we are connected to our land and we will protect it as if it were a matter of protecting our own lives. Because that’s what it is.

Indigenous people are survivors, and they must survive for all our sakes—they are at the forefront of the struggle against the accelerating industrial-colonial society that would rather drive us all into the darkest abyss of collapse than to degrow, decolonise, scale down at a controlled pace and find the way back to the land. To survive, the Sámi gain strength through the yoik, through the words and melodies and stories of another world that is possible, a world that is not dead and must not be reinvented because it still lives in these people. Jannok’s yoik is the sound of the noaidi driving out the colonisers from the land and from people’s dreams.

Sápmi is the norm, power, beyond doubt. I sing about what I know. I sing about truths that have been censored, removed. But music, language, culture wouldn’t be alive if it weren’t for the human beings. Us. Human beings keep fires alive. And fire in its turn keeps humanity alive. So I can but show respect and gratitude to those who’ve given me the chance to live with pride, all my forefathers and foremothers who have gone before us and shown the way. Mum, dad, family and sinewy ancestors. Without these people we wouldn’t exist, and the music wouldn’t exist. It comes from us. I honour the people who’ve clung to the tundra as the windswept mountain birches, and who never let go no matter how hard the wind blew in times far harder than these.

Sápmi as the norm is an alternative to the slanted, short-term perspective of colonial society. Through Jannok, the noaidi’s voice comes to bring a new world to both the minds of Indigenous peoples and the minds of the people in settler societies who may not even understand their own role in the world system. It tells the story of a diverse world where there is room for everyone and where we all know the land. I long for that world, for a place where I can exist. Jannok describes a home that I have been denied by my colonial-industrial culture.

Listening to this story of another world, looking at the world through the grieving eyes of Sámi people, we can find ways to decolonise everyone’s minds and the land we are part of—in Sápmi, Sweden, Europe, and the world.

Rut Elliot Blomqvist is a songwriter, musician, writer, and PhD student in literature and environmental humanities who thinks a lot about environmental justice, degrowth, and the mythologies of contemporary Western society. Ze particularly likes to combine storytelling, music and analysis with activism and farming in searching for ways to describe and build a good life for hirself and others.

Sofia Jannok’s new album, ORDA: This Is My Land, is available on Discogs, Amazon, iTunes, and Spotify. You can buy other merchandise on her website, www.sofiajannok.com.